In the past several years, it seems, Canada has become almost lousy with big-dollar art prizes. From the Sobey ($70,000) to Scotiabank Photo ($50,000) to RBC Painting (this year, for its 15th anniversary, a whopping $115,000 between 15 finalists) to the Kingston Prize for portraiture ($22,000), the typically impoverished field is awash in prize money.

Into this insert the AIMIA-AGO Photography Prize, which, despite this being the first year under this name, isn’t new. Formerly the Grange Prize, AIMIA, administered by the Art Gallery of Ontario, has grown this year, both in prize money (up to $85,000; $50,000 to the winner, $5,000 to each of the runners-up, and a $20,000 scholarship fund) and in breadth of candidacy. Where the Grange limited its finalists to two Canadians versus two from a partner nation (recently, India, Mexico and the U.S.), AIMIA reaches further afield, requiring one Canadian finalist among the four, who are chosen from a global long list of 14 put forth by a committee of nominators.

Unlike other awards, which rely on juries of curators to determine a winner, AIMIA remains a matter of public consensus, where online voters determine the winner, which will be announced Thursday night. Here, in brief, are your final four.

Chino Otsuka, Japan: Otsuka conflates the ambiguities of memory with the much less fluid practice of photography with an ongoing project of inserting her grown-up self into photos of herself as a child on family trips to places like the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris or Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The series, called Imagine Finding Me, amuses straight off but lingers as warm and strange, with an unquenchable sense of loss.

Erin Shirreff, Canada: In her long, slow video works, Shirreff works with the formal tension between the still and moving image. Though in motion, her pieces are cobbled together from hundreds of still photos, occupying an odd, irreconcilably liminal space between video and photography.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, United States: Frazier, likely the mostly widely exhibited artist here, is much lauded for her series of documentary works on her family’s experience with post-industrial disaster in her hometown of Braddock, Penn., a former steel town hollowed out by the departure of heavy industry. The images are frank, unblinking and disarmingly personal amid the broad tragedies of poverty and social decay wrought by the failure of industry.

Edgardo Aragon, Mexico: Born in Oaxaca, Aragon’s work addresses the rampant crime and violence that has become a daily feature of life in contemporary Mexico as the drug cartels and federal authorities wage all-out war amid an increasingly lawless disaster. His piece currently at the AGO, Darkness, is a video showing members of a traditional band, standing on land markers in Oaxaca, playing a death march. Shot individually and then played simultaneously, the result is maddeningly out of sync — a metaphor, to be sure, for the riotous nightmare of daily life there.

The AIMIA-AGO Photography Prize exhibition continues at the AGO until Jan. 5, 2014.

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